Joel prepared to obey, though it was not without aversion that he went again to the edge of the Gentile country.
He was full of bitterness while he was obliged to tarry on the banks of the Missouri.

The hatred of those who had persecuted him and his people, bred into him from boyhood, flashed up in his heart with more fire than ever.

Even when a late comer from Nauvoo told him that Prudence Corson had married Captain Girnway of the Carthage Grays, two years after the exodus from Nauvoo, his first feeling was one of blazing anger against the mobocrats rather than regret for his lost love.
"They moved down to Jackson County, Missouri, too," concluded his informant, thus adding to the flame.

They had gone to set up their home in the very Zion that the Gentiles with so much bloodshed had wrested from the Saints.
Even when the first anger cooled and he could face the thing calmly in all its deeper aspects, he was still very bitter.

While he had stanchly kept himself for her, cherishing with a single heart all the old memories of her dearness, she had been a wife these seven years,--the wife, moreover, of a mob-leader whose minions had put them out of their home, and then wantonly tossed his father like a dead branch into the waters.